“Several were almost tharn—that is, in that state of staring, glazed paralysis that comes over terrified or exhausted rabbits, so that they sit and watch their enemies—weasels or humans—approach to take their lives.”
– Richard Adams, Watership Down

Go to enough legal tech conference sessions and you’ll eventually catch the fear. It may start with a shocking statistic or factoid —”80% of big law firms have been targets of hackers” or “The FBI unofficially recommends paying the cryptovirus ransom”— and it will escalate quickly into a litany of sinister sounding jargon and neologisms.

Speakers offer ad-hoc tips to ward off doom. Use a VPN. Only use a TOR browser. Encrypt all things religiously, at rest and in transit. Never use Facebook. Never share your cell phone number.

Some audience members drift off in absentminded denial, rummaging in conference bags for a phone charger or a breath mint. At least one person always nods sagely. The rest of the room clears throats nervously, devolving into an awkward, semi-panicked stasis. Lawyers listen silently. You can see it in their eyes. Like the rabbits of Watership Down, they are tharn and in that state of staring, glazed paralysis.

We all know this is typical of lawyers terrified or exhausted by cybersecurity topics, right?

Now, if only someone just made a device that makes them stay safe. Would we not be willing to sacrifice a great deal in our smartphones if we thought it would spare us (and our clients) from the terror of being hacked and exploited?

We pine for the days when we just locked secrets in a metal filing cabinet and that was that. They didn’t go zinging off into the interwebs because a bad link was clicked, or someone plugged an infected USB into the computer. Back when phones were dumb and made of Bakelite, they didn’t alarm our houses and pin drop the nearest car share, but neither did they encrypt the firm’s files and demand a Bitcoin ransom.

For some, this pining represents an opportunity. Now people are rolling back the clock on smartphones, nixing the novelty stuff, and scaling up on privacy and security. They see a little bit of self-imposed austerity as being called for, at least if the trade off is better privacy

As the developers (who include Tutanota, a company I wrote about before) explain: “No connections to Google’s office in Mountain View, no connections to US Department of Defence, no connections to US Department of Justice”

But what’s most interesting:

UnaPhone is so secure that you can’t even install your own apps on it.